Walking in Our Shoes Project to Take Centre Stage at UK’s Leading Mental Health Innovation Event
The voices of people living with limb loss will be heard on a UK-wide stage this October, as UWTSD’s Walking in Our Shoes project is invited to share its story at the Mindset Roadshow 2025. Led by Dr Ceri Phelps, Health Psychologist, Project Lead and Principal Lecturer in Applied Psychology at UWTSD, the project will spotlight how lived experience, and co-production of resources to reflect real needs, can transform mental health innovation across the country.
Taking place on Thursday, October 16 at Life Sciences Hub Wales, Cardiff Bay, the Roadshow will bring together innovators, clinicians, researchers, charities, and policymakers to explore how emerging technologies and lived experience can combine to transform mental health services.
Hosted in partnership with the Health Innovation Network South London and aligned with Innovate UK’s £20 million Mindset Programme, the event will showcase how immersive digital therapeutics are being developed across the UK. Alongside the focus on XR (extended reality) solutions, the programme will spotlight Walking in Our Shoes for its unique approach to placing the voices of those with lived experience at the heart of mental health innovation.
The Walking in Our Shoes project, funded by The VTCT Foundation and delivered in partnership with the Limbless Association, is redefining how psychological and emotional support is designed and delivered for individuals living with limb loss. At its core is a commitment to co-production: involving amputees directly in the design, testing, and creation of resources to ensure they reflect real needs and lived realities.
Dr Ceri Phelps said: “This project is about listening, truly listening, to those whose lives have been transformed by limb loss. Being invited to the Mindset Roadshow gives us a chance to highlight how co-production can shape more meaningful and impactful support, not just for limb loss, but as a wider model for mental health and wellbeing innovation.”
Earlier this year, the project held its first co-production workshop in Cardiff, where volunteers with lived experience of limb loss worked alongside researchers to shape the resources that will support others facing similar challenges. UWTSD’s Assistive Technologies Innovation Centre (ATiC) and the Wales Institute of Digital Information (WIDI) are now exploring digital delivery platforms to ensure the resulting tools are accessible, empowering, and user-friendly.
Barrie Evans, a lived experience expert within the project, said: “Being involved in this gives me a chance to prove that there is a life after limb loss and your world can go on, even if it is in a slightly different way. If I can help one person to not go through what I went through, that will make me happy.”
The Mindset Roadshow 2025 runs from 9am to 3.30pm and aims to spark a powerful national conversation about the future of mental health innovation in Wales and across the UK.
The Health Innovation Network South London are still accepting registrations for this event.
For more information about the Walking in Our Shoes project, please contact:
Dr Ceri Phelps – ceri.phelps@uwtsd.ac.uk
Further Information
Rebecca Davies
Executive Press and Media Relations Officer
Corporate Communications and PR
Email: rebecca.davies@uwtsd.ac.uk
Phone: 07384 467071